Finding Long Streets

With an additional 3% of tax per street after five streets, maximizing the amount of property you can have on each street has become critical. Only problem is how on earth do you find these lengthy streets?

1. Discover them manually.

At this point in the game the best tip I can give you here is to seek out remote areas where others may have not considered. Think about regions where there may be less internet-savvy players who bought up big local streets early. There seem to be quite a number of lengthy streets of Alaska, or the parks in Oregon. Some regions in the world are completely barren of streets that are purchase-able period, but try zooming out and looking for highways and zooming in to see if they’re available.

Another tip is that sometimes you may see a long road but you can’t seem to get it to show up. The red M flags indicating that there is a street available are not accurate, as you can tell they’re arranged in a grid-like fashion. The point where it’s purchasable tends to be in the very center of the road, also if the road curves, you may find the ‘sweet spot’ somewhere inside the curve than along the actual street.

2. Use Tools.

I’m strongly against any form of cheating, but if you can use an aid that can help you could have done manually then it’s okay in my books (ie. in the actual board game, having the person across from you roll the dice for you). There’s already a number of Monopoly City Street Tools listed, a few that can help in street searching:

Miself Script – allows you to buy and build at the ‘region’ zoom level, that is one zoom less than normal MCS browse zoom.

Extended street info script – I’ve yet to try this one, but it says it can easily figure out the initial value of a street – which is helpful on deciding whether to bid on a semi-developed street or whether to sell your own.

Final tip – even if they’re not available, or listed, try putting a bid in for it anyways. If the 7-day auto-trade policy is in effect, and they scored a great road and dropped out of the game, it just might be yours.

* Note – the MCS team says they’re working on the glitch that is capping the number of properties on long streets – I’ve been hearing it’s currently maxing out at 400 or so buildings. Either way, long streets will still be critical over the stretch of the game.

Question: I sent an offer (with 3 streets) and the other player dont make a reply (maybe dont play any more). I can make anything with that streets… the offer will expire or I will loose that streets?
thx!

I have been running head on into that 400 building max thing. I have 3 streets that have lots of space but I cannot build anymore. The worst part of that bug is that it lets you try and build the building, takes your money but doesn’t put up the building. I lost over 1 Billion to an autobuild script that thought it was adding more buildings. If this cap stays the largest street it is worth it to get is around 15M. I have a 15M street that is mostly full, but has a few greenhouse spaces I cannot fill. My longest street is not even half full.

I didn’t want to buy another street while I still had space so I have been going back and selling lower value buildings on other streets to make space for monopoly towers. I can’t build many of them a day, but it stops the money (and therefore the chance card fines) getting too high.

I check around certain area’s every day, its increasingly hard to find any streets over 8M at all, I looked into some of the trading sites but the amount people want for streets is pretty high and would take a hell of a long time to get any profit back from them.
I’m starting to try and look for big streets owned by people with little cash, this suggests that a bigish offer would be accepted while they’re a little naive or that they arent playing any more and my offer will be accepted in 7 days, unfortunately you have to check your bids every day to make sure you dont get out bid and it also ties a lot of cash up for a long time.

Over at Marketpoly, there’s a guy named BARFOO selling several $10+M streets every day. Where’s he getting them from?

Did he really buy them all in the first week and hold on to them until now (if so, how did he afford so many long streets so early). Is he buying them from unconnected players and then profiting from listing them on an active auction site? Or is he getting them through cheating?

Remember a while back I announced I’d publish an interface to my streets database. Luckily (for me) I first checked for how much I could sell the undeveloped streets it finds. Instead of publishing it I use it to buy a couple undeveloped streets every day and sell them to the highest bidder.

You’re a master programmer then. Because the other databases don’t find even a fraction of what you do. I don’t know how there’s any left to be found, since any area I’ve looked at manually is really picked over.

Those streets are going for crazy prices. I bought one around $1.5B. But I can’t keep up with the $3B prices I’ve seen lately. So I guess I’ll stick with my nine remaining streets and enter Phase 2 of my plan soon.

Most other people doing automated street search have made one capital mistake.

They index all streets. That way you get a huge list, but nobody cares about 95% of the streets in there.

About 50-75% of the streets I sold in the past few days were sold to the bank shortly before I bought them. If your list is huge you cannot update the status quickly enough to snatch newly-sold streets.

I’ve written a quick’n'dirty map drawing tool that graphically shows my database – as soon as I thought of a better way to show both available and owned streets in one place I’ll post a link to the image.

Respect for your strategy. You found a unique way to make billions as a real estate agent, leaving us builders far, far behind.

I am curious though how you manage to transfer your money to your main account Narrrf? I assume that you sell streets to yourself? Are you not afraid that one time soon the MCS team will send you to jail you because of ‘playing with multiple accounts?

So by you (and others) buying all of the big streets (or even buying smaller streets) and selling them at inflated prices does that even leave much room for the rest of us to play?

I’m doing pretty well I think, close to my national leaderboard again, top of my local, making about $3.5 a day between 7 streets, but now that I’ve maxed all of those streets out I’m on the lookout for more. How do I compete with someone like you in finding decent streets when all I’m doing is scrolling through the map and looking for places with streets for sale? Are there even any decent streets left (I’d assume if there were, you’d buy them)?

I don’t see a point in me wasting my time by spending an age scrolling through the map looking for streets when there are none.

@Remco buy a small street with one account, bid a huge amount of money from the other, accept offer. Of course that is technically illegal, but you cannot do anything with an account in the global top ten. Just take a look at narrrf’s SS7 street.

@TJ of course that leaves room for you. Like you said, many are fed up with searching for streets. I make that process a lot easier for those. Based on my sample size of over 66000 streets with a price of 5 million or more, there are 163 streets available for sale – that’s a quarter of a percent. Most of the streets I sell have been sold to the bank, mostly by inactive players. Chances to find such a street by manual search are virtually zero, so I don’t really reduce your own chances.
Consider this: Fill a smaller street with 100 30mil buildings, pay 3bil, get 120mil rent. Buy a longer street from me for 1bil, fill with 400 5mil buildings, get 520mil rent.
That way a street is well worth the billion you pay to me

Yeah I payed a couple bill for a street from Martin and it already earns me 800mill a day so the cost isn’t that bad. I definitely agree paying abit more for the ease of getting a longer street is very nice.

The scanning and the map picture is done in PHP.
My building bot is done in Ruby (but hasn’t built a thing in a week or so).
Anything else, I might use Java, Ruby, PHP, C, Haskell, Erlang, or whatever works for the job.

I know that when you bid on a street it takes the bid amount out of your balance and if the bid is rejected the money goes back into your account, but shouldn’t the same happen when you are outbid on a street?

I’ve probably bid about $10bn on various streets over the last two nights and only one (thanks a lot Martin ) has been rejected and I got the money back, but others that have yet to be accepted or rejected, yet someone has bid more on, I don’t have that money back.

That seems like a glaring error to me. What happens to all of the other bids if the person doesn’t log back in and the highest bid gets it after seven days? Speaking of which, I made a bid on a street almost a month ago and even though the user stopped playing around the same time, he still has the street, and I still have the highest bid. What happened to the 7 day auto-accept rule?

I had $100M’s tied up for days with owners who were slow to reject. I had $100M’s more lost to out-bidding bugs or lapsed-player bugs. I lost a $1B street to an exploit that allows a player to buy a street you own from the bank.

I can’t afford to buy long streets anymore anyway. I thought $1B to $2B for a $10M+ street was reasonable and would eventually turn a profit. But above that I don’t see a point. At least Martin was decent enough to reject my bids before they got lost in the auction system.

When I collect rent tonight I’ll have enough cash to finish upgrading all my streets to Graduated Megastructures. After that I’m just going to log in once a day and collect cash. I don’t see anything else to do that won’t just burn cash and waste time.

(I originally planned to go on a buying spree, snatching up all the sub-$1M streets that were still available. I’d be lord of the slums! But now I discovered that there’s a 33% chance of losing cash to negative Chance cards when buying streets. So there’s no way to live off my savings once I pass the 38-street cap.)

My 33% figure is an empirical estimate from a small sample size. Among the last three streets I bought from the bank, I drew a Chance card on every single one: one hazard, one bulldozer, and one stupid accountant. (I fired him; does anybody have a competent accountant to recommend?)

I don’t remember drawing any Chance cards on my earlier streets. So I thought that buying those was immune to Chance. If that were true, then I could collect cash for a couple weeks to stockpile a nest egg before my buying spree. $50B would go a long way toward buying up $200K streets. But if any of those streets wind up costing me 90% of my $50B, then there’s no way to continue.

I didn’t realize that the negative Chance cards are based on daily rent rather than current cash. I could sell my productive streets after accumulating my stockpile (since the taxman is gonna clobber me anyway). Then my rent would be a small fraction of my cash, and I could survive much longer.

It’s a big risk, but if I get knocked from the Top 2 on my local leaderboard or don’t think of something better, I might go ahead with that plan just so I can say I was the greediest slumlord on Monopoly City Streets.

Martin, how did the big street trading fix affect you? I saw that your BARFOO and BARFOOO accounts are at zero. And I haven’t seen any more listings on MarketPoly. Did you get jailed? Or are you busy collecting the massive influx of streets from lapsed players?